MISSION HILL SCHOOL 67 Alleghany Street, Roxbury, MA 02120 [email protected] S617-635-6384 Fax 617-635-6419 Deborah W. Meier, Co-Principal T, Brian Straughter, Co-Principal Dr. Thomas W. Payzant, Superintendent February 28'h, 2005 Boston Public Schools 26 Court Street Boston, MA 02108 Dear Dr. Payzant, Attached please find the School Quality Review for the Mission Hill School and also our Faculty Council's response. The time our community spent organizing for the SQR is useful as it forces us to review our work and identify areas of strength and potential for growth. We have benefited greatly by having an experienced group of educators provide us with such a thoughtful evaluation. Many of their commendations and recommendations are areas we also identified as we prepared for the evaluation. When you present our SQR report to the joint BPS/BTU Steering Committee, please accept my request to participate in this conversation. Having a dialog together with the written documents will add to understanding the work of Mission Hill School. Please let me know if and how we can make this possible. Respectfully Sub Brian Straughter, for the Mission Hill School Community cc: Charlotte Spinkston, Co-chair / Mission Hill Governance Board Boston Pbublic Schools 26 Court- Streert, Bosto, MA 02108 Dr. Thomas Payzant, Superintendent Mission Hill School Response to School Quality Review Introduction There are many things about Mission Hill School that the team captured during their three day visit. There were many high scores in the report as well as areas that were observed with potential for growth. Out of the five major focus areas, our lowest score was 3.1 and our highest was score 3.5 (an indication that our school is doing quality work). The team identified in the report that they "learned that everyone places the individual needs and welfare of students at the center of planning and thought; that everyone works incredibly hard and for long hours to realize their shared vision of serving these students; that every member of the community is respected, caring and supportive of each other." These are words that do describe our school. We thank the team for their thoughtfulness. Following is our response to the School Quality Review report. We have reflected on the many insightful commendations and recommendations to make our school even stronger. While three days is a short amount of time for an outside team to wholly understand our school, our comments here may help produce a clearer picture of Mission Hill School. Focus Area #1 Vision and Context (3.3) Mission Hill by design is staff governed which forces the principal to give up much of the traditional hierarchy and distribute that leadership among the fulltime teaching staff. It means that teachers must be willing to think and act like a principal in addition to their responsibilities as classroom teachers. It is why the school purposefully shares the responsibilities of the principal with the teachers to make up our Faculty Council. We all own the vision and the long range planning of the school. Our Statement of Purpose, which was adopted in 1997, still holds strong today. As the SQR team described, "the ideals in this Statement of Purpose are evident in everything the school does." From when parents first come to learn about the school to our weekly Newsletter, our vision of a well educated person and democratic ideals are promoted. Similarly, our Habits of Mind and Habits of Work are an important part of our vision. Trying to help students, teachers and parents internalize our habits are difficult and take time. We do expect that students will challenge us in many ways; to be feisty and not just compliant. Ongoing discourse helps lead to growth, understanding and better 'h decision making. As observed when the SQR team talked with the 8 grade students, our approach is effective in leading students to use these habits and "think without even knowing." The teams recognized the ease we have promoting Be Kind and the difficulty helping students learn how to Work Hard. Our school uses protocols for giving feedback on quality work; from both students and teachers. We also support the philosophy and practice drafts as an important path leading to quality work. We will investigate how we can be more explicit with students about achieving quality in their work. Focus Area #2 Governance, Leadership and Budget (3.5) The founding-Planning Committee of the Mission Hill School believed strongly that those most responsible for teaching the students should be in positions for making and implementing important decisions. By placing teachers in these decision making roles, they would have to think beyond their class of students and make decisions based on the best needs of the school. There would be no "us" and "them", as typically observed in many hierarchical schools. Mission Hill would share decision making so the fulltime teachers would buy into the philosophy. The school was founded on this strong and unusual philosophy and with the caveat that the staff makes all curricular decisions. These are cornerstones-our brick wall. This wall is what makes Mission Hill a strong school for our students (and by extension, for education reform). All of our meetings are open (see exception in Focus Area #4), and we have many documents that govern the school (i.e., Governance Document describes the role of the Faculty Council, Parent Council and Governance Board). We understand our cornerstones - means of governance - are sometimes difficult for people who are not part of our Faculty Council. The SQR report captured this for "several" parents. The staff is open to suggestions and criticism, but we must keep the decision making to the ones most directly working with the students. We will investigate here how to help families feel more connected. An area we feel that was difficult for the team to deeply observe the school relates to the many ways in which we examine student work. Five hours are spent each week on student achievement, staff development and school business. Student data is disaggregated and reviewed throughout the year in Work Groups and Houses. We identify how students are progressing in the grades and identify gaps in our practice. We also spend time together to talk about this work school-wide. This is in addition to the daily assessments teachers conduct to document student's needs and progress. See Focus Area #3 for more information. We recognize there will always be some families that will have "means and expertise" and will get their child additional resources. That goes for any school no matter how effective it may be. We understand this is important for some families, and our school is committed to making sure that all students are achieving regardless of how fortunate their family may be. To ensure that all children receive equitable and adequate resources, we hold a weekly student support meeting staffed by a team of experts-teachers, principal, learning coach, family therapist, psychologist, occupational therapist, and others. These meetings focus on strategies and best practices, and at times outside referrals, that promote a child's success in school. As far as we know, no family feels we are not watching out for their child, and many structures in the school are designed to make sure no child slips through the cracks. The recommendation to hold training for the selection of students to the Governance Board is excellent. We will also extend this to a training for the entire board. Focus Area #3 Teaching and Learning (3.1) This is the heart and soul of any school evaluation -how well does the school go about the teaching and learning of students. In many of your comments in this section, and throughout the report, words describe our school as having high standards, helping students develop habits in their learning and taking responsibility for their work. It's wonderful that the team observed these qualities, and we appreciate the addendums from two of the team members. Though this section received a cumulative score of 3.1, our very unique governance design, curricular approach, and organization of the school may not have been adequately understood by all committee members. We believe our teaching and learning is very strong and our graduate records are impressive. We submitted several documents that describe our evidence of student progress. In a school our size, it does not make sense to have data "disaggregated across sub-groups." We are too small. Thus our information is often school-wide and can be broken down in any ways we wish. Last year, for example, we looked at habits of mind and work by race to help us examine our own biases in assigning grades to students. This important work is continuing this year as part of our professional development. Student achievement is also monitored through data including reading tapes that occur twice a year; writing samples used to assess student's competency with unassisted work; and BPS math mid-year and end-of-year assessments. These assessments are scored and reviewed by staff to look for patterns in our student's growth throughout the grades. Regular class work and participation is also assessed by each teacher on a daily and on- going basis. Our professional development work is structured around the principle that teachers are the individuals who know their colleagues work best and are the ones best in the position to assess and improve practice (the tenets of Roland Barth). Thus we do, in fact, present our curriculum plans and methods for documentation each year to each other and interns.